Mark Morrell Intranet Pioneer

Standards that make SharePoint 2010 a success

When you are faced with implementing SharePoint 2010 your intranet needs the right standards to make the launch and ongoing use a great success.

How can you do this?  Firstly you need to be clear why you have standards.  The reasons why usually include:

• Legal: web accessibility, copyright and image rights
• Regulatory: compliance with country and international agreements
• Business: content reviewed regularly and up to date
• Users: content ownership clear, easy to use and find

Your intranet standards need to:

• Improve the overall user experience
• Make people more satisfied
• Increase productivity
• Save costs
• Benefit the business

When using SharePoint 2010 I recommend five standards you must include.  These cover the different types of content and tools that you can use with SharePoint 2010 ranging from accredited information through to collaborative discussions.

1. Ownership

You need to be clear that all your information is managed and has an owner.  Intranet managers need to be able to contact an owner if there is a problem with their content quickly and easily.  People need to know who to contact if they need more information not shown or wish to check about anything that has been published.  You need to reassure your senior managers that any risk has been removed of non-compliance from information not managed.

2. Currency

Your employees must be confident they are using the most up to date information.  You need to clearly show a review date, in line with your information retention policy, for people to see.  Your content must be reviewed regularly and be removed if it is no longer needed and out of date.

3. Security

SharePoint 2010 permissions need to be correctly set so people only see the information they have permission to see.  Get these right at an organisation-wide level to save time and effort later.  Owners (site administrators) of content can decide at a site level who can have permission to create, edit, as well as view content published.

4. Usability

Your information must be usable and valuable to people using it.  Use SharePoint 2010 webparts to create the experience research with people has shown is needed.  Train your publishers on ‘tone of voice’ and ‘writing for the web’ to help achieve this.  To use the full range of SharePoint 2010 features well you must make it easy for people to share views, discover other people and their skills, find the right information and use what they find with the minimum of effort and time taken.

5. Accessibility

This is not an optional extra.  It is mandatory.  You need to go that extra step beyond usable content and make sure your content is accessible to everyone whether they are impaired or not.  It needs to meet WCAG 2.0 guidelines.  Legal requirements do vary from country to country.  For the UK AA level is the current expert recommendation.

What you need to do is check standards are complied with.  This can be achieved by using people or outside auditors to check content or better still, if you can afford it, an automated compliance checker tool.